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Cash and Carry

Secrecy was the hallmark of the money train, which quietly ended its tenure last January.Credit
John C. Urbanski, 1992

SHORTLY after the start of the not-so-seminal 1995 heist film “Money Train,” there comes an appearance by the title character, an imposing subway train covered in silver armor plating and equipped with flashing orange lights and sliding barred doors, like those on a jail cell.

The money train, as the vehicle is known, carries the system’s cash, protected by surly guards in bulletproof vests and overseen by an even surlier Robert Blake, who keeps a shiny model of the train on his desk at transit department headquarters. “Nothing stops the money train,” he growls, at which point viewers are supposed to feel a chill.

The film, which also stars Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Jennifer Lopez and centers on a New Year’s Eve robbery, shines far more light on the money train than it received in real life. That may be why few New Yorkers probably noticed the retirement last January of this underground cash cache, done in by the arrival of the MetroCard and machines that allowed people to buy them by credit card.

The low visibility of the money train was by design, the longtime policy of security-conscious transit officials. “I believe it was retired, yes,” said Deirdre Parker, a spokeswoman for New York City Transit. “But we never wanted to talk about it then, and I’m sure we don’t want to talk about it now.” The diminished duties of the train will be assumed by armored trucks, which have always played some role in transit money collection.

The transit agency is mum on the subject of how much cash the money train carried, and the magnitudes involved make wariness understandable, even with the train now defunct. In 1993, the year before the MetroCard was introduced, fare-box receipts totaled more than $1.2 billion.

The money train was mentioned in The New York Times as early as 1905, a year after the subway opened. Typically, the train rolled through the system on a secretive and ever-changing schedule, carrying a few transit employees and pistol-toting guards, and hauling away sacks of cash. “When you had the token booth clerks, every booth that had a lot of money was a candidate to get robbed,” said Larry Furlong, director of public affairs for the Electric Railroaders Association, a rail fan group. In 1993, there were 58 such crimes.

The real money trains — there were several — did not exactly resemble the sleek, stylish model depicted on screen. The trains were two cars long, with one holding the workers’ lockers and one holding the money. They were painted a dull yellow and could be distinguished from the system’s work trains in only one important respect.

“Both cars may have had bars on the windows,” said John Urbanski, a retired transit supervisor who participates frequently on subchat.com, a subway discussion Web site. “The windows would either be painted over, or there would be newspaper or something covering up the windows. Nobody could look inside.”

The money trains were hardly the height of technology; the transit agency tended to assemble them from retired stock. The last versions, Mr. Urbanski said, were built in the 1950s.

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SECRECY was the train’s hallmark. “It had sort of an element of mystery to it,” said Paul Kronenberg, a math tutor who is renowned among subway buffs for having rebuilt an entire motorman’s cab in the bedroom of his apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. “How it came and went was kind of mysterious, and there was this whole allure of ‘What if someone ripped off the train?’ ”

For a time, people did rip off the train, or at least pre-empt it, stealing money from a station just minutes before the train’s arrival. According to newspaper accounts, a rash of such robberies occurred in the ’20s — at least 10 were reported between 1924 and 1927 — suggesting a leak in the department that determined the train’s schedule.

During that crime wave, the thief typically wandered casually over to the token booth, stuck the nose of a pistol through the ticket window, grabbed a few heavy bags of nickels — the cost of a fare at the time — and escaped. The take was often no more than a few hundred dollars, but the heists were sufficiently frequent that the risk must have been worthwhile.

As the police caught on, the thieves sometimes altered their method. One day in July 1925, five minutes before the money train was to arrive at the 50th Street station, a robber flashed a transit worker card to the token booth clerks and asked to use the phone. Moments later, pistol in one hand and a bag containing $342.50 in the other, the robber escaped among the theatergoers on Broadway. The clerks reported that the man had a “wicked eye.”

Sometimes people tried to rob the train itself. On three occasions in 1950, three Manhattan teenagers descended into subway stations with that goal, although, either because they were cowed by the number of potential witnesses or because they had simply missed the train, they did not succeed. On the fourth attempt, which took place after midnight in the 175th Street station on the A line, they missed the train, ended up shooting the token clerk to death and escaped downtown, whereupon they stole $60 from the Grand Union Hotel on East 32nd Street. The three were arrested the next morning.

Long below the radar, the money train has sparked little notice even among transit devotees. In fact, its greatest fame may have come through the movie that bears its name, although what people seem to remember most about the film is that it was vilified for its portrayal of a man setting fire to token booths, a crime that was repeated in real life after the film’s release.

Still, even after the demise of the money train, one can’t help wondering if there wasn’t a real-life Robert Blake-style character wandering around, protecting the train from bad publicity and calamitous theft. “You mess with my train,” the Blake character says in the movie, “and I’ll kill you.” Only he doesn’t say “mess.”